My worms do seem to enjoy the fruitfly culture material I put in the bins after I can them. I dig into the bin and I always find worms in the FF culture, in nowhere else in particular. May be the yeast, may be the well decomposed, and ever so tasty dregs from the culturing process.
I'm not going to big on aeration with pipes since the worms are in my closet, but I do have a fan with a carbon filter on it, and it is also a negative ion generator, to reduce any musty odor and to circulate air in there.
The goat manure I use has been in the goat pen for quite some time, and was stomped down into a rather hard cake basically. I dampen it and put some water in the container then into the microwave to steam and 'pasturize' so no secret uglies pop up and start messing with my worms health.
The 'goat cake'
has some alfalfa mixed with it since that's what the goats eat, with an occasional sweet feed.
If I get a ranch or some land, I will be composting en masse. I want to build troughs, if I go to a high elevation, and keep the worms down below the ground level and have compost heating on top to keep the worms warm enough to get through the winter well.
I will have them above ground in the summer, then push it into a trough in winter.
I'd like to experiment with the above mentioned technique with a small green house or cold frame and try growing cold weather crops and some leaf vegitables with the aid of some slight heat from the compost. I Have no idea how successful this would be.
Would be nice to grow some food to supplement the other animals, if I get them, maybe using hydroponics, and warm the hydro solution with a solar heater or run some line through a chamber in the wood stove, which they run alot where I went to high school at (I miss the smell of a good pinion or cedar or juniper, or oak wood burning in a wood stove in the crisp winter night air while walking the hillside ) I mention this cause an old buddy built his own wood stove with a chamber made of the left over vertical pipe that support the ski lifts at the ski resort, he built the lodges there, and added a rectangular chamber on top, over the pipe, that has heat routed into it through a side chute, and the rectangular chamber has tubing running through it to run water through to heat the water.
I figure if I could use this spaghetti tubing in through another chamber with water and use that water for the hydro solution, then I could also keep the worm and compost area warm and active with that warmer water/solution during the below freezing weather there.
Some say why bother, I hear Rick saying it right now, from somewhere in southeast US, a bumping of the molecules moving across the US, through tropospheric ducting no doubt
, just a vibe and I answer, cause I just want to have a good worm supply when spring rolls around to compost quickly and make the most of waste material I can drag in during the winter while I'm in town working. This will keep the culture active, I am speculating, and when spring and summer roll in, a massive explosion of activity and healthy soil to build a lighter soil from the heavy clay and sometimes rocky soil where I'm speculating on going.
The worms will serve a purpose in not only breaking down the waste to active and healthy soil amendments, but also aerate the soil, but I'll probably have to use a european nightcrawlers for the aeration process, as they are burrowers. Reds up top, and euro's for deeper aeration.
I'm going a bit off on a tangeant, but I'm dreaming up a worm culture, and hopefully a active and healthy self-sustaining polyculture that will get me through the new depression/recession
I'm also wanting to experiment with using cool well water to circulate in the worm bins when it gets too warm, like it does here in phoenix, and after it warms try to set up some kind of cone with a venturi effect and put a water jacket around the coolest part of the neck of the venturi throat to recool the water.
This is all speculation from stuff I dreamed up while sitting in the library and out on hippy ranches while living in the middle of nowhere in the mountains when I was younger, but never got to implement these ideas.
I mention all this stuff cause being in Phoenix I have to develop a way to keep my worms, which do not survive much over 80 degrees, alive and thriving in a place that gets well over 100 degrees most of the year, with little rain during the hot season.
I lived in an area that had alot of mine shafts, horzontal as well as vertical, when I was young. We had dirt bikes and we'd ride hard in the hundred plus degree summer, and I'd feel dizzy and we'd just run up to a mine shaft and walk inside and it was instantly cool. Like 100+ to 60 degrees in ten or twenty feet
maybe more...
but I think about using that crude technology to cool my worms in this hot area.
Ground pipes that are cooled deep down and bring cooled air to the location it is needed.
Some would say that it's too much work, but where I lived you didn't have work all the time, and there was time to do these experiments, not to mention I like to make the most of natural 'resources' and then use other technologies to supplement that, not the other way around.
Ranchers, like you, may not have that kind of time though
I think that the intial intake temperature for the air, before it goes deep, would be critical, and that if there were bushes that had good moisture transpiration around the entry, and shaded, would keep the air from heating up the deep area of the pipes.
This may sound like alot for worms, but it's not just for worms, but they would be my canary in the gold mine for the initial experiment.
Shading the worm bins with solar panels in summer, and using misters to cool would also keep the worm area cool enough to thrive in summer, I hope, but here in the ol' apartment my options are really limited, so it's a couple bins in the closet of my air conditioned room.
I'd raise rabbits over the bins if I could, but I'm not quite that sophisticated yet..., but I am considering mice over the bins if it doesn't prove to be detrimental due to the amount of ammonia that the mice produce with their urine.
If I had the place outside I could raise the rabbits and other critters over the worm bins, and the fruit flies could come for the stuff on the top soil of the worm bin, and insects that eat the fruit flies could feast on them, then they in turn could produce manure, my mantis manure project (yes, it is a joke Rebecca) could fuse with the other critters manure to feed the worms, and keep the polyculture thriving.
Springtales could be cultured in the worm bin for very small mantis cultures and dendrobates, dart frogs, maybe.
Water from a fish or fresh water shrimp pond could keep the worms moist, While being sprayed up to cool the surrounding area through evaporation, and aid in the soil decomposition while adding nutrients. There is a fresh water shrimp farm between phoenix and yuma, at gila bend, so I know that can be down. I used to do work for the owner sometimes, a while back.
An old friend of mine was telling me of some experiments in africa where they would use a layer of salted water as a sort of magnifier, or something like that, to keep the water warmer underneath when it's cool, and they could raise the shrimp when it normally couldn't be done, and they were experimenting with using some pressure from this setup to make some minor energy. Just something I'd like to check out.
As you can tell, or not, my use of earthworms is actually geared toward a self sustaining polyculture. The insects are part of that for making good soil and pest control. Now if I can just get the place of my own to do this stuff
or maybe I'll just raise a cupful for fishin'.......
As the older gentleman that came to be a friend of mine, that was the researcher and always had the answers when nobody else did, his name was Phil
, he would say to this post, "Blathery, nothing but Blathery"
Just fishin' for ideas, with worms
